Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

The market is a category of commodity economy, which in the course of its
development is transformed into capitalist economy and only under the
latter gains complete sway and universal prevalence. Therefore, in order
to examine basic theoretical propositions concerning the home market we
must proceed from simple commodity economy and trace its gradual
transformation into capitalist economy.

I. The Social Division of Labour

The basis of commodity economy is the social division of
labour. Manufacturing industry separates from the raw materials industry,
and each of these subdivides into small varieties and subvarieties which
produce specific products as commodities, and exchange them for the
products of all the others. Thus, the development of commodity economy
leads to an increase in the number of separate and independent branches of
industry; the tendency of this development is to transform into a special
branch of industry the making not only of each separate product, but even
of each separate part of a productand not only the making of a
product, but even the separate operations of preparing the product for
consumption. Under natural economy society consisted of a mass of
homogeneous economic units (patriarchal peasant families, primitive
village communities, feudal manors), and each such unit engaged in all
forms of economic activity, from the acquisition of various
kinds of raw material to their final preparation for consumption. Under
commodity economy heterogeneous economic units come into being, the number
of separate branches of economy increases, and the number of economic
units per forming one and the same economic function diminishes. It is
this progressive growth in the social division of labour that is the chief
factor in the process of creating a home market for
capitalism. “...Where the basis is commodity production and its
absolute form, capitalist production,” says Marx,
“... products are commodities, or use-values, which have an
exchange-value that is to be realised, to be converted into money, only in
so far as other commodities form an equivalent for them, that is, other
products confront them as commodities and values; thus, in so far as they
are not produced as immediate means of subsistence for the producers
themselves, but as commodities, as products which become use-values only
by their transformation into exchange values (money), by their
alienation. The market for these commodities develops through the
social division of labour ; the division of productive labours
mutually transforms their respective products into commodities, into
equivalents for each other, making them mutually serve as
markets” (Das Kapital, III, 2, 177-178. Russ. trans.,
526.[2] Our italics,
as in all quotations, unless otherwise stated).

It goes without saying that the above-mentioned separation of the
manufacturing from the raw materials industry, of manufacture from
agriculture, transforms agriculture itself into an industry, into a
commodity-producing branch of economy. The process of specialisation that
separates from each other the diverse varieties of the manufacture of
products, creating an ever-growing number of branches of industry, also
manifests itself in agriculture, creating specialised agricultural
districts (and systems of
farming)[1]
and
giving rise to exchange not only between the products of agriculture and
industry but also between the various products of agriculture. This
specialisation of commercial (and capitalist) agriculture
manifests itself in all capitalist countries, in the international
division of labour; this is true of post-Reform Russia as well, as we
shall show in detail below.

Thus, the social division of labour is the basis of the entire process of
the development of commodity economy and of capitalism. It is quite
natural, therefore, that our
Narodnik
theoreticians, who declare this process to be the result of artificial
measures, the result of a “deviation from the path,” and so on
and so forth, have tried to gloss over the fact of the social division of
labour in Russia or to belittle its significance.
Mr. V. V.,
in his article “Division of Agricultural and Industrial Labour in
Russia” (Vestnik Yevropy [European Messenger ], 1884,
No. 7), “denied” “the dominance in Russia of the
principle of the social division of labour” (p. 347), and declared
that in this country the social division of labour “has not sprung
from the depths of the people’s life, but has attempted to thrust
itself into it from outside” (p. 338). Mr.
N.–on, in
his Sketches, argued as follows about the increase in the
quantity of grain offered for sale: “This phenomenon might imply
that the grain produced is more evenly distributed over the country, that
the Archangel fisherman now consumes Samara grain, and that the Samara
farmer supplements his dinner with Archangel fish. Actually, however,
nothing of the kind is happening” (Sketches on Our Post-Reform
Social Economy, St. Petersburg, 1893, p. 37). Without any data and
contrary to generally known facts, the categorical assertion is bluntly
made here that there is no social division of labour in Russia! The
Narodnik theory of the “artificial character” of capitalism in
Russia could only have been evolved by rejecting, or proclaiming as
“artificial,” the very foundation of all commodity economy,
namely, the social division of labour.